Dealing with "Intelligent" Adversaries

Adonis Antoniades
(Professor S. Shankar Sastry)

Our research is part of an effort with the Mixed Initiative Control of Automata teams program (MICA). Our team works on developing agents that can deal with “intelligent,” as we term them, adversaries. The focus of my research is designing missions for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). In particular, we are given that some enemy activity may take place in a specific region at a specific time in the future. My task is to provide algorithms for the helicopters to guide them into flying over that region in such a manner as to suppress enemy activity. These flight patterns vary greatly depending on the nature of the expected enemy activity. For example, some missions will require that the helicopters observe every part of a specific region as often as they possibly can. Other missions require the UAVs to move in such a way as to effectively “corner” a moving target. To successfully design such algorithms, we draw upon a wide range of resources, including game theory, network flow, and statistical learning theory.